Compact Disc technology was developed at a time when the Internet as we know it today did not exist. At the time, no thought was given to the security issues faced today by the content industry. However, now, with the advent of the Internet, the security of content provided on compact disc is a problem.
In the prior art system when a compact disc is placed in a legacy drive, the data can be “ripped,” e.g. acquired by a computer system, and thus distributed to the world. Generally ripping data includes generating a digital copy of the data and compressing this digital copy. One example of the compression mechanism used is MP3. This permits a user to make any number of copies of the tracks ripped from the original disc. Furthermore, the application can make copied discs, which may be used by others. This is disadvantageous to the content providers, since users can create copied discs and distribute content via the Internet. It is also disadvantageous to users because ripping a disc is a tedious, unreliable process.
One prior art solution is to encrypt the data on the disk, and provide a key to the user to decrypt the data. However, the user can pass the data key along to other users. Therefore, this solution is not secure.